Hello everyone. I'm Danny Wolterstorfer, Daniella. Hi, I'm Chris Beddow. And we're here to talk about the curve and its relation to mobility. So to start I'm gonna give you a little transportation lesson on what mobility is. So

first So this is what you see, okay. So an advantage of the curve is that it's pretty much a static space that can have different uses, dynamic uses. So for instance, you can have on a corridor, a roadside of the curve could only be a bus lane that operates during rush hour, but at nighttime

it works as residential parking or has specific loading zones during specific times or TNCs pick up and drop off areas. Or perhaps it can be a protected bike lane with dynamic functions on the remaining side of the road.

So yeah, there are multiple curb uses that we as planners, engineers, programmers, transportation professionals, most importantly residents, we all move from one place to the other, depend on for mobility. So for different transportation modes, but what is mobility? So mobility is the ease of traveling along the existing transportation system.

Both mobility and accessibility go hand in hand. They're important benefits of an efficient transportation system. The fewer the number of trips a person takes to get from one place to the other, the fewer the number of trips and the shorter the distance people have to travel every day, the better it is for society and the

more likely it is for people to choose one mode of transportation over their personal vehicular, their personal car to move. So inventorying and mapping the curb can provide aid in managing the dynamic uses of this static and quite popular

street real estate. Love my cheesy effects. However, managing the curb is becoming increasingly complex and it's a critical task because of the multiple demands for moving people and freight. So think about like short distance deliveries and how it's also changing traffic and the way people move along the curb.

It's blocking bicyclists, it's blocking pedestrians, and then there's also the sidewalk side of the curb that a lot of cities don't see is actually the curb. So first the sidewalk would only be used for pedestrians, but now it's also used for sitting, eating. You can have parklets where you take up a

designated or a former designated parking slot to have a cafe that works from this time to this time. And you're extending it from the sidewalk into the roadside. So it's a combo of both just as one curb use.

So similarly, there are changes in public transportation and then as transportation technologies change and we get AVs, autonomous vehicles, and everything is pretty much automated. You have transit that's automated,

private vehicular use that's automated, TNCs that are automated, deliveries that are automated. The use of the curb is going to keep growing and keep changing. And we all depend on it. So in other words, the traditional uses of the curb have changed. Here in this graphic

you can see the traditional ones, the recent uses, and the emerging uses. And of course that's going to keep changing. Just think about like the last 10 years and how it has changed already.

So I hope you found this transportation lesson short lesson helpful. As members of the OSM community though, Chris and I would like you to think about how OSM can embrace the curb, how we can map these diverse uses within the static map, and how we can prepare ourselves and

OSM for the different and useful uses of the curb. So a disclaimer we want to start off with is we're not necessarily here to give you the answers. We don't have a perfect solution to propose, but we will more want to highlight the problems.

We want to pose the right questions for what we're dealing with and we just want to stimulate discussion that will continue beyond this session and beyond this conference. And finally, we hope that this will eventually lead to better solutions as well as just awareness among the community. So when we want to look at mapping mobility

as well as accessibility, we need to know probably a few basic tenets and I would break those down into collection, into storing, and into sharing of mobility data. So we ask how do we collect our own data? How do we as community members go out and collect it? How do we as

maybe GIS managers and all these different roles that need that kind of data, what tools are available? Once we have it, what does it look like? And this may not necessarily mean even an OpenStreetMap. It might be just how cities store this. It might be how companies store it.

Instead of going out and trying to collect it on our own, alternatively, where do we find this as open data? So an interesting thing, and I don't know if you went to Chris's sign. What was the name of it? Fixing OpenStreetMap with Government Imagery. Okay, of signs. A lot of it was of signs.

So a lot of governments and municipalities actually have work order systems for sign management, but it's internal. But they have photos of the signs along the sidewalks that need fixing. This is data that they just have stored and then perhaps don't know that we could use it.

They could also use it for care of management in the future. So there's data being saved somewhere in the computer, but we just need to find a way to access it and let them know, hey, this is actually quite helpful. We can do this, this, and that with your data. And one of the interesting things is quite often cities have this data, but they don't

even realize they have it. They don't realize they have what we might need as OpenStreetMap users in order to enrich the map. So it's up to us often to figure out who to talk to and how to get to that data and open it up. So again, we come back saying the data is in the computer somewhere and we need to get it out.

So this quote is very interesting. Just to read through it quickly, a few members of the team captured the data themselves. Not only did they create a clear digital map, but they got deeper insights needed to approach the city with suggested mobility improvements.

It would support more residents and visitors being able to access the area and support the businesses that call downtown Santa Monica their home. So this is the CEO of CORD talking about their application that helps collect curb data. What's interesting about this is this is actually the heart of OSM going back many, many years. This is nothing new.

So you're talking here about something that seems to kind of revolutionize the ability of a small team of community members to go out and collect data. Yet, we have many mobile apps already available to all of us. Many open source ones that we have on our phones now and we have many initiatives that are community-wide where we go out in

the streets very literally on foot just collecting that data. So we know how to do this as an OpenStreetMap community. We're very good at getting data. The difficulty is when it comes to actually agreeing what you do with it once it's collected, what it looks like, and how we actually visualize it. And we're very passionate about doing it. We come here every year.

So here's a graphic from shared streets and it really to us, I think this demonstrates the difficulty of trying to think of the curve in simple terms. So from a mobility perspective when we're trying to say we want to map this

we're looking at a lot of different things. We're looking at two sides of a line So you might ask, we'd say, how do you collect something that you see in this image? And how do you tag and classify it in OSM? These are eternal questions I think right now and questions that will continue to be more relevant to us as

the map becomes more relevant to people that need this data. So we might say the curve is a line. There is a tag in OSM where you can draw a line and tag it as a curve. It looks like a dashed line in the editor on an ID. And sure, that might represent what looks like a curve, but at the same time it might be a polygon.

It extends from that line onto the road and then it's an area where you might put a car and it really matters how wide it is and how long it is. So you get two dimensions. But there's also a series of points like where the line changes colors.

It might be blue for one car length and then change to red. And then there's a sidewalk on the other side of it. There's also cuts in the curb and there's a lot of complex pieces here that really raise the question of how do you even map this thing? And once you have it mapped, there's also the question of how to tag it.

So you're getting more abstract here. So I pulled this off of TagInfo. You can see clearly, yeah, that about 75% of things on OSM that are curbs are marked as lowered. So curb equals lowered is really an accessibility thing and not really as much of a mobility thing.

It just means that the curb cuts down. It's probably connected to something like a crosswalk and it's just saying that you can move across there if you're for example in a wheelchair on a wheeled vehicle. This really ignores kind of an entire aspect of what the curb presents to us and that's

the two dimensions of like polygons. It's the two sides of that line. It's all the points that break the curb up into different pieces. So when we were researching what we do about this problem, we sent out some messages to members of the community.

We had a blog post that we wrote together and they got some reactions and it got discussion in the mailing list. So we picked a few people who seemed very proactive about this in the mailing list and tried to ask them for further details on their opinion. So one open street mapper from Spain

stated the data sets to be successful in mapping something in OSM, you need knowledge of the thing to map. Local knowledge is the best. Mapillary data and others will be well received. I don't think satellite picks are useful in this case. We need street-level images, but what about verified IA, so artificial intelligence,

recognized data and for doing what? So more questions here, really. But I thought it was very key to say that you need to really know what things mean to you besides just simple geometry on the ground or shapes on the map and street-level images are a very powerful way to document this. You can

collect imagery that then allows you to sit down and dig into the greater details when you're in the OSM editor rather than necessarily spend all your time in the street documenting things. So it's very powerful to collect that data for later analysis. Another OSMer in Germany said creating a better tagging schema is a good path forward.

But I still believe it cannot be purely about the curb without addressing the larger sidewalk problem. So again, there's more to this than just that line that divides the road from what's separate from it. And this really goes to recognize efforts, for example, like open sidewalks that want to map more and more of these sidewalks and then we can start mapping other things around them.

So there's a lot of confusion here and it really begs the question among many. Maybe in a positive sense, maybe in a negative sense asking is OSM really the proper home for this type of data? Do we really need the curb there? It's barely there today. So what's the answer?

So like one of the yes, it should be an OSM arguments is we're mapping everything on OSM. We're mapping all the trees. We're mapping... Oh my god, I forgot the word. We have water waves, we're mapping bike charging stations, things that didn't exist when OSM was invented.

So as transportation technologies are changing, why aren't we adapting the map to these changes? Why aren't we saying okay, yes, AVs are coming. We are also, there's I think there's a map, sound maps

for the visually impaired. So why aren't we adding that data to them? Why aren't we providing that to also people with mobility issues where they can say, okay at this time there's gonna be trash pickup on my street. Why should I make a right or should I make a left? If that data is on the map, if we have all the

conditional tagging for the different uses of the curb, whether it's a line or a point or both, we can help not only regular residents, but also pretty much everyone. We're... I'm a transportation professional, so I see it from the point, the perspective of moving from point A to point B and getting to point B in an efficient

way. And if we are using applications for mobility that are getting that data from OSM, why are we not completing that data so that we can... That's my argument for a yes. But this OSM has... Does it have the right tools right now for us to map it and to map all these different uses?

And many people are discouraged by stringent rules of tagging, by contentious arguments about how to tag. And really it can it can be discouraging because

there's a lot of pressure to adhere to one standard to get everything right before we even start going out and mapping things. And so it really means we don't even get started because we're caught up in the details before we can get our feet out on the ground and out in the street collecting this data. So I recently saw this in the OSM weekly newsletter, a paper by Clancy Wilmott at the Royal Melbourne

Institute of Technology. And this quote, I think, particularly points out how maybe we don't need to get bogged down in the details all the time. So he says in general about arguments with tagging and such that, I propose moving our classificatory fixed points, models, and assumptions away from the generalized to the troubled,

to the graveyard of lost proposed features and change sets, and dying there in the hope of fertilizing new possibilities, perhaps ignored allies will help by adding ambivalence and fuzziness to our mappings. I think it was very useful to think how the ambivalence and fuzziness of many tags in OSM

means that people are finding creative uses. We're doing a lot of trial and error. We see what works and what doesn't and this really drives the evolution of mapping things that maybe OSM wasn't originally intended for. So this is probably the direction we need to go with getting things like mobility and accessibility data on the map

before we really understand how that data is going to evolve in the future. So if we don't map it, what happens? What happens in the world of OSM is that we're going to be a little behind. Again, as not only transportation technologies, but we as

movers are changing the way we move. So think about if who here is a cyclist sending one bike and there's a UPS truck blocking the cycling lane. So you have to risk your life if you're allowed to and go into the road and cross your fingers that a car doesn't hit you.

That has to do with improper curve management or pretty much no management practices and that's also because it's not on the map. There's no designated use in the vast majority of cities in the US for pickup drop-offs There's no regulations, even if they specify this is a TNC area who's regulating this, right?

Having it on OSM would be a way to open it up for everyone, the public, the governments and the private companies, private agencies, which leads to this being a love triangle.

So it's very important because we have so many people contributing to the OpenStreetMap, so many consuming it. People involved in many different ways on many different scales, whether it's government, business and citizens and communities. They all contribute to mobility.

Many of us depend on it. Many of us depend on it for the businesses that we're involved with or just getting from home to work. Many of us work with it maintaining the map. Creating the data, analyzing the data to figure out what the patterns are. We break things and we make things. There's so much involvement going on and the important thing is that it all tries to find some harmonious direction.

So this love triangle of government, business and communities is very important to foster and we think this is the way forward toward finding a common ground on mapping mobility and accessibility and things like the curb are a great place to start.

So, thank you. I don't think we have time for questions. No, but you can find us. Thank you.